Brooklyn Pantry Struggling to Help Fill Gap Left by Federal Cuts to Food Stamps

Amria Watson of Bedford-Stuyvesant selects groceries to feed her four children at the Bed-Stuy Campaign Against Hunger food pantry in Brooklyn.Credit
Dave Sanders for The New York Times

In the middle of last week, panic set in at the food pantry in Brooklyn run by the Bed-Stuy Campaign Against Hunger.

Staff members there alerted their boss, Melony Samuels, that their stock of produce and staples was being “wiped out” and at the rate people were lining up for food, the pantry would be bare before the weekend. So Dr. Samuels did something she said was a first: She called in the “cavalry,” pleading for money from donors and deliveries from sources like the Food Bank for New York City.

Dr. Samuels and other advocates for poor New Yorkers attributed the spike in demand at the city’s hundreds of food pantries and soup kitchens to a cutback in the federal food stamps program on Nov. 1. The elimination of $5 billion in stimulus money from the program will amount to a loss of $29 per month — enough for at least 20 individual meals — for the typical family of three receiving food stamps in the city, the New York City Coalition Against Hunger estimated.

In its annual report scheduled for release on Tuesday, the coalition reported that one-sixth of the city’s residents and one-fifth of its children lived in homes without enough to eat. Those rates of “food insecurity” have not improved over the past three years, despite the steady recovery of the city’s economy, said Joel Berg, executive director of the coalition.

“There is a great disconnect between the broader economic indicators and the fact that there is absolutely no recovery in any meaningful way for low-income New Yorkers,” Mr. Berg said in an interview. “At no time since the Gilded Age has there been a greater disconnect.”

The most dire change has been in the Bronx, where more than one-third of residents (36 percent) and nearly half of the children (49 percent) could not consistently obtain balanced meals from 2010 through 2012. Those three-year averages were up from about 29 percent and 37 percent during the three-year period that led up to the financial crisis — 2006 through 2008 — the study states, based on data from the United States Census Bureau.

But even in Brooklyn and Manhattan, two boroughs where real estate prices have risen to record highs, the number of people without enough money to feed their families is on the rise, the report shows. That trend was evident from the line snaking down Fulton Street last week outside the pantry Dr. Samuels runs.

With Thanksgiving a week away, about 30 people waited for approval to enter the pantry and fill sacks with potatoes, onions, milk and rice, and if they were so fortunate, a chicken or a ham. It was too late to get a turkey. Dr. Samuels said the pantry had given out more than 1,000 and had no more.

On Thursday, she was relieved that the shelves were not barren. Overnight, 19 skids of food had arrived from the Food Bank and other sources she had appealed to, she said. Her call for help was a signal that raised concern throughout the network of organizations that help feed the city’s poorer residents.

Carol Schneider, a spokeswoman for the Food Bank, said that she could not recall Dr. Samuels ever needing to make such a plea. But she said it was not surprising given the stress the federal cutback had put on the budgets of the working poor.

Winsome Stoner knew what Ms. Schneider was talking about. A married mother of five in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, Ms. Stoner, 39, said the cut to the family’s food stamps this month amounted to about $50, or about 8 percent.

That brought her to the pantry for a Thanksgiving ham one day — “I got a nice big one,” she said with a broad smile — and back again last week for ingredients for the fixings.

But beyond the holiday, when pantries and soup kitchens are flooded with donations and volunteers, she did not know how she would make do with less. She said she had relied on the pantry for produce because it was too expensive at the Associated supermarket where she spends her food stamps.

“I’m sort of diabetic, so I’ve got to use vegetables,” Ms. Stoner said. But, she added with a shrug, “you’ve got to eat what you can afford.”

Mr. Berg said the coalition estimated that demand was up about 10 percent this year at pantries and soup kitchens — before the federal cutback kicked in. An annual study of them found that nearly half said they had to turn people away, reduce the amounts they gave out or limit their hours of operation.

Amria Watson, a single mother of four, is part of the new demand. Since having a baby three months ago and having to quit one of her two jobs, she has been a regular at the Bed-Stuy pantry.

Ms. Watson, 35, said she was in constant need of milk, cereal and juice, and also preferred the fresh produce, some of which comes from the pantry’s own gardens. “If I ever run out, I come here,” she said. “The collard greens are so good.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 26, 2013, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Brooklyn Pantry Struggling to Help Fill Gap Left by Federal Cuts to Food Stamps. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe